Voting For Your Own Oppression

Column Written 6/12/1996
Copyright 1996 Mumia Abu-Jamal

"THESE POLITICIANS ARE SO DEVIOUS THEY WOULD DISOWN THEIR FATHER, DENOUNCE THEIR MOTHER, DENY THEY WERE BORN OF PARENTS, AND BURN THEIR BIRTH CERTIFICATE IF THEY THOUGHT IT WOULD COST 'EM A VOTE, EFFECT THEIR INFLUENCE, CUT INTO THEIR SO CALLED POWER."
JOHN AFRICA, "On the Move" Column, Philadelphia Tribune (7/29/75)

When a Philadelphia politician recently dared to criticize the city's mayor for his sluggish response to the police killing of a Black resident, the mayor dismissed the criticism out-of-hand, by boasting he received eighty-percent of the city's Black vote in his last election.

Translation: If Blacks don't like my stand on certain issues, they won't vote for me: but since they did, what's your beef?

In city after city, in election after election, some Black leaders make much ado about the vote, the 'sacred franchise', so much so that Blacks make a fetish of the vote, obsessing over it as a symbol of citizenship, forgetting it is a secular exercise with one objective: power.

Some 30 years after African-Americans have won the franchise, that central objective, power, seems as elusive as ever.

We should not confuse presence with power, for although many government bodies have Blacks present, they are so constructed that power, or the ability to exercise the will of their constituencies, is, more often than not, a mirage.

How could this be otherwise in a system that practices 'majority rule'? In a system where whites are in the overwhelming majority?

In such a system, Black politicians may don the same suits or skirts; if judges, they may be clad in the same robes of office, but they are never free to exercise the power of their white colleagues. Never.

Several years ago, Black intellectuals and civil rights people were sorely distressed at US President Bill Clinton's slighting and rejection of an alleged 'friend', law professor Lani Guinier, for a high post in the US Justice Dept., reportedly because her published views were out of some presumed 'mainstream'. What 'mainstream'? We shall see.

Prof. Guinier's area of expertise is the Voting Rights Act, and how to apply those theoretical statutory rights to the real world. In her view, the 'majority rules' way meant a permanent denial of meaningful representation for the numerical minority; thus, she suggested proportionality, or banking votes according to a group's percentage in a given population.

Thus, Guinier's theories challenged the US historical and contemporary practice of white, i.e. 'majority' supremacy, and its monopoly of power.

Clinton, fundamentally a Southern politician, in the interest of continued white supremacy, could not be seen supporting a political appointee who supported a theory that diluted white power.

So, in our millions, North and South, we continue to vote for politicians whose interests are not our own.

We vote for politicians who spit on our dreams.

We vote in a system that was initiated, is sustained, and continues on the foundation of Black oppression and containment.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

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